Wanted: cake shop manager with more experience at rustling up gorgeous goodies with flours, eggs, and butter than a Mr Kipling factory. Experience essential.

Experience is one thing the Cake Mania franchise is definitely not short of.

Indeed, this is the second game from the series this year to land on Pocket Gamer's desk. If you're worried that this level of output will inevitably entail repetition, you might be relieved to learn that the franchise has changed hands.

Jumping from RealNetworks to Digital Chocolate means Cake Mania: My Story is a vastly different experience from the last outing in the series - Main Street. Despite this, if you're looking for a fresh take on time-management you should look elsewhere.

As such, the routine behind Cake Mania: My Story is utterly predictable.

Managing the game's cake shop is a case of making cakes to order as customers come to the counter. This means dashing over to distribute menus before moving over to an array of machines to make tasty treats.

Next comes delivery and, assuming you've filled the orders in time, payment.

It's a simple enough exercise when dealing with one or two punters, but - as you might expect - Cake Mania: My Story ups the ante by throwing customers in your direction five at time, each one after increasingly complex orders.

Cake hate

To Digital Chocolate's credit, the interface it employs (moving the game's cursor from object to object before hitting '5' to carry out the action) is solid and completely fuss free.

It's little wonder the publisher has chosen to create Cake Mania: My Story according to a proven formula. For anyone who has sampled such delights before, however, there's nothing new whatsoever delivered here.

It's no exaggeration to say you could easily be forgiven for thinking you've played this exact same game in the past, because you may well have.

Even the game's supposed 'bonus round' – a rudimentary take on Bejeweled – is recycled from past releases, meaning Cake Mania: My Story is likely leave large numbers of players with anything but a sweet taste in their mouths.

Though in the hands of a new publisher, Digital Chocolate's treatment of the Cake Mania franchise is to drop it into the model it's deployed across multiple time-management games already, making this sweet story one to miss